Dear Paul,You wrote a letter to us.1 Here is my answer.In your latest book Dysphoria Mundi you set out to assess the state of our world, and particularly its transition during the COVID‐19 pandemic, from a trans philosophical perspective. You mobilize a good amount of philosophical literature, but also various other disciplines (sociology, history of science, immunology, . . . ) to ground your analysis; you clearly despise the disciplinary orthodoxy. Your book does not view the world from nowhere; it starts from your own embodied being in that world. I read your work as an “experience book,” à la Foucault, whose critical value lies not just in the analytic clarity of its content but in the transformative force of its form.2 Over the years, I have been transformed through your poetic originality, and, to give our fellow readers a glimpse of its power, I try to incorporate direct quotes from your prose into my response whenever possible.Your theorizing is a “documentary” philosophy, “a philosophical‐somatic notebook of an ongoing planetary mutation process” (28). Your thought is as nonbinary and as “in transition” as the object of your inquiry, and instead of claiming neutrality or noninterference, you aim to write this book as “a machine for producing truth and desire” (27). An academic reader who is unfamiliar with your work might also be surprised to find, between serious attempts to interpret the government's management of the pandemic as an instance of a fundamental paradigm shift in the contemporary modes of governmentality, a few poems, “funeral prayers” bidding farewell to the relics of a soon‐to‐be past regime of power/knowledge. In your chapters you consider the aspects of our world (time, life, the code, sexual difference, the senses, the narrator, the car, fashion, truth, language, the city, labor, society, history, freedom, democracy, god, sex—to name just a few) that are “out of joint,” or in transition. Just like Hamlet's world becomes dysphoric to him after he learns about the murder of his father, just like his “time is out of joint,” you scrutinize the various ways our world has started to mutate, to “depatriarchalize” itself, to go “up the ass” and “come like a bitch” (65). Based on this working hypothesis, that we live in times of crisis, a “planetary condition” (19) of dysphoria mundi, you wonder what we might see from the standpoint of those who have the most experience with the vocabulary of dysphoria. We are forced to deal with the WTF questions (Bettcher 2019), and we have learned to channel our “desire to fabricate a place outside the binary system of masculinity/femininity, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and to transform this experience (which we have traditionally been taught not to think about, or to consider unnatural or unspeakable) into writing” (30). This, I take it, is the bedrock of your trans philosophy. My drag mother She/gel would put it this way: If the world looks at you dysphorically, you must look back at it dysphorically (Hegel 2001: 24–25). The research questions are, then: how can the fictive dysphoric position we get assigned everyday become our “revolutionary platform” (452), how can we send the dysphoria back to where it came from, making room for the “utopian organization of political desire” (50)?Your methodological approach to these questions is Foucauldian punk: antiauthoritarian, DIY, Eat the Rich. You provide a critical genealogy of what you call the somatheque, that is, of our body in its capacity as “a living political archive” (55), tracing it as the object and site of inscription of power in the pharmacopornographic era (Preciado 2013: chap. 2).3 Yet, the body is always both “the site of violent inscription of petrosexoracial power technologies and a possible agent of collective mutation, able to operate displacements and to introduce ruptures in the repetitive history of world capitalism” (43). You are hence interested in the ways in which the epistemic, political, and technological rearrangements of power introduced during the pandemic result in both regressive (neoconservative, fascist, authoritarian) and emancipatory (dissident, ecological, feminist, queer, trans, anti‐racist) forms of subjectivation (25). The target of the warfare strategies used by the enemies of reproductive rights, of breathing Black bodies, of paid subaltern workers, and of trans self‐determination is our somatheque, and that is at the same time the motor of our resistance. We can win that battle only if we do not let ourselves be reduced to a “normative cis‐penis‐cis‐vagina assembly of soft machines for reproductive purposes” (40), if we prevent each other from getting lured into “addicted and depoliticized subjectivities” (300), if we interrupt the “becoming‐junkie” (303). Instead, you argue, we need to trace the “political genealogy of the fabrication/destruction of the somatheque in modernity” because it also yields the tools for drawing a “cartography of the possible practices of emancipation” (24), for asking how to form “new collective assemblages with other human and non‐human bodies and with energetic machines” (44) to become not just an assemblage in‐itself but for‐itself—a “sexual lumpenproletariat of history” (30), as it were.Your analysis builds on Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe to understand how the “virus actually reproduces, materializes, widens and intensifies (from the individual body to the population as a whole) the dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already operating over sexual, racial or migrant minorities before the state of exception” (85). Modern politics, you claim, is all about how these living bodies are managed, how their (re)productive capacities are economically used and exploited, fictionalized, disciplined, and destroyed (81), particularly through “biochemical and digital media technologies” (113). You remind us that “AIDS reconstituted and remodeled the colonial control grid of bodies and updated the sexuality‐surveillance techniques that syphilis had initially woven together” (88), that the regulation of the AIDS epidemic was inherently tied to the social imaginary of an endangered white and heterosexual national community, about to be penetrated by the outsider, foreigner, migrant, racialized, transvestite, transexual, or homosexual (123). A virus, then, is never faceless: It quickly becomes racialized, queer, trans (164). It haunts and reinforces an understanding of who belongs to the “new utopia of the immunitary community” (184), and who does not. What we already knew from AIDS was again disclosed in its brutality during COVID‐19, namely, how the global capitalist regime answers the question: Whose bodies matter?Despite all optimism about the radical social change that could have been brought by the triple crisis “of perception, of sensibility and of meaning” during the COVID pandemic (211), your judgment is quite clear: The confinement was rather a digitalization, a mutation from the analog era to “telelife” and the “telebody” (268). And it produced on the one side the “digital” workers of the mind, and on the other, the subaltern workers (200), often racialized and feminized, with “analogical” bodies (210). The “teleworkers” clap on their balconies, while the “i‐slaves” work in hypersurveilled factories to produce the technology necessary for telework, and the “reproducers of life” take care of the rest (286). And then, “End of lockdown, end of applause” (297). Back to normal.If we want to grasp the “truth,” we need to stop our fixation on the West and especially the United States, “the leading manufacturer of colonial and capitalist legends and the audiovisual and digital myths of our time, from Hollywood to Twitter.” We should not be fooled by the United States’ attempt to “now suddenly side with ‘truth’ when it has built its political and cultural hegemony on manufacturing and managing fiction” (235). How could these fiction industries yield any promising models for democracy or freedom, given the history of violence on which they are built (355)? Your poetic readings of the spectacular choreography of failed white masculinity during the storming of the Capitol as well as the bizarre drama that was Joe Biden's inauguration demonstrate this absurdity. But if the regressive reactions to the crisis care more about the protection of dead traditions, institutions, and statues than the lives of their fellow human beings (329), how do we respond? How do we, dissidents of the binary gender system, create our own utopian spaces of survival where we experiment with new world‐making practices (337)? This is one of the central questions trans philosophy must address (Zurn et al. 2024: viii).It is a question of transitioning. You strikingly describe how you find yourself somewhere “between an anatomically normal ex‐body and an as‐yet unnamed somatheque,” and how your body becomes “a speaking architecture, an ex‐manifesto for a non‐binary ex‐future epistemology” (172). This transition toward another epistemology and ontology is not as simple and linear as the standard cistemic account of “transition” would have it: the old (gender, system of knowledge, regime of power, etc.) dies, the new emerges. Instead, it is a process of “self‐anthropophagy” in which one consumes and digests one's previous “political fiction” and thereby transforms it (104). This cannot be an entirely solipsistic act. On the contrary, you make it very clear that there is something wrong with the liberal view, eager to defend the subject's individual property rights and personal bodily sovereignty even when it comes to imagining self and world differently. If what I consider to be my gender is in fact something “we collectively make” (394), our fight for trans liberation must aim “for the possibility of renegotiating and modifying the collective terms of a certain political epistemology” (395). Hence, you search for transversal counter‐hegemonic alliances with all the other somatheques who make up the “somatopolitcalumpen” (438). New political desires are nothing to be practiced and experimented with in isolation (441). Our challenge is to unlearn the colonial legacy of the gender binary together (464), to “debinarize” ourselves (467), and to find ways to be touched by one another in ways that leave behind the logics of military and heterosexual penetration.I was touched. For example, by your description of your sexual encounter with Sygma, the transfeminine dissident companion you encountered in this dysphoric world. You describe the political beauty of T4T sex, the experimental staging of a different kind of aesthetic and kinetic choreography of bodily interaction: you have “sampled, looped, and reassembled” yourselves (415). From the viewpoint of the old epistemic regime which only knows heterosexual and homosexual and cis and trans, you have become unrecognizable. You have refused the painful recognition which is none. In Orlando, My Political Biography (2023), you already explored the force of this collective politics of derecognition, for example when the multiple trans Orlandos in the doctor's waiting room tell each other how best to play by his norms of gender recognition in order to get the psychological certificate they need. Toward the end of your new book (448–52), you flesh out thirteen counterstrategies of mutation that make this politics more palpable. Among these counterstrategies are disidentification with norms, collective emancipation from violent epistemic frameworks, “autobiohacking,” or the socialization of the means of somatheque production.4You wrote a letter to us, and I answered. You invited us to join your counter‐dysphoric assemblage. I recollect many moments in which I unbecame through your writings, but I am glad that you now derecognize me as your descendant and urge me to derecognize you as my ancestor. We walk side by side, gesturing toward the new regime of recognition of the living (Preciado 2023). You have given yourself to our generation, and you have become, for better or worse, the father figure of Spanish queer and trans theory (Duval 2021). Your dysphoric children are born and very much alive. We want to give back. Let this be the moment where we, the Unrecognizables, teach you what we learned from you, about becoming extra‐recognizable, about the euphoria of hearing the roaring sound of a cistem's fall. In solidarity, Samu/elle
Samu/elle Striewski (Fri,) studied this question.